Insulating glass units employed in windows and doors commonly are manufactured by sandwiching a peripheral spacer between aligned, parallel sheets of glass. The finished units are packaged and shipped to another location in which the glass units are provided with appropriate frames to form finished windows and doors. The sheets of glass used to construct insulating glass units are transported from a location where larger sheets are cut to form appropriately sized smaller sheets.
Containers have been developed for transporting sheets of glass and insulating glass units. One such container comprises a floor, an end wall supported at right angles to the floor, and a series of parallel rods extending from an upper edge of the wall to a lower, forward edge of the floor, the rods being spaced from one another by a distance enabling glass sheets to be inserted between the rod pairs. Although containers of this type are appropriate for conveying vertically aligned glass sheets for very short distances, such as across the flat floor of a factory, they can be inadequate for supporting glass units against breakage during shipment when the containers are subjected to bumps and jolts, since the individual glass units can move upwardly and forwardly parallel to their planes as well as from side-to-side. The container itself, as described, can be wrapped horizontally with a heat-shrinkable plastic film in an effort to stabilize the sheets, but if sheets of different sizes and shapes are intermingled, only the larger sheets will be supported.
Another such container is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,120,206. This shipping container comprises a floor and an upright rear wall that intersect at approximately a right angle for vertically supporting a plurality of parallel panels, with the edges of the panels being supported by the floor and the rear wall. A plurality of elongated, elastic restraints, such as elastic cords, are carried by the container and are positioned so as to encounter a respective panel and to elastically urge that panel toward the intersection. Each elongated elastic restraint extends generally in the plane of its respective panel from the rear wall above the floor to the floor forwardly of the rear wall. The restraint contacts and elastically presses against the upper, forward corner of the glass unit. One drawback of this type of container is that it is tedious and time consuming to separately secure each panel with an individual elongated elastic restraint.